Aglyph can assemble "prototype" components (a new instance is created every time), "singleton" components (the same instance is returned every time), "borg" components (a new instance is created every time, but all instances of the same class share the same internal state), and "weakref" components (the same instance is returned as long as there is at least one "live" reference to the instance in the running application).

Aglyph can be configured using a declarative XML syntax, or programmatically in pure Python.